Archive

This part is going to be cen­tered on modern‐day Iran. Or, that ter­ri­to­ry that sits where ancient Persia used to sit. The great empire that chal­lenged Greece. The great empire that chal­lenged Rome, often extreme­ly suc­cess­ful­ly. The coun­try that freed the Hebrew slaves to return from Babylon. The coun­try that insti­tut­ed the first writ­ten char­ter of human rights to do with free reli­gious wor­ship.

We’re going to have a brief excur­sion to one ele­ment of what Fred Halliday would’ve called ​“cul­tur­al con­di­tions,” cul­tur­al thought that leads to rebel­lion. We’re going to have a look at lib­er­a­tion the­ol­o­gy, and what that has to say about rebel­lion.

The chal­lenge for the Church and for the the­olo­gians was to say okay, per­haps that’s what is writ­ten. But for exam­ple if you con­sid­er that God has deliv­ered the Creation in sev­en days, know­ing that nowa­days Amazon can deliv­er every­thing on Earth overnight, it means that Jeff Bezos has defeat­ed God? Or does it mean some­thing dif­fer­ent? And I think it means prob­a­bly some­thing dif­fer­ent.

We’re look­ing at reli­gion as an orga­nized and above all insti­tu­tion­al­ized sys­tem of beliefs. The orga­ni­za­tion par­tic­u­lar­ly of tex­tu­al or oth­er record­ed teach­ings that form the basic faith frame­work of the reli­gion, and the insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion which polices those teach­ings, polices the extent, the lim­its, and above all the inter­pre­ta­tion of what those texts might mean.

The best jus­ti­fi­ca­tion we have for killing fifty‐six, fifty‐seven, what­ev­er bil­lion land ani­mals and a tril­lion sea ani­mals every year is that they taste good. And so, in a sense how is this any dif­fer­ent from Michael Vick, who likes to sit around a pit watch­ing dogs fight, or at least he used to?